Spanish

In a world of ever evolving LGBT rights, you might wonder why a language school would start a gay-specific Spanish immersion program. Isn’t the idea of LGBT equality to be equal rather than separate and discriminate? While this argument surely can be debated from both sides, we think it’s a great idea and fully support the concept of the program. So if you’ve ever considered studying Spanish in Spain, here’s why you might want to consider studying at Spain’s first LGBT language school, located in Seville.

Update:we just received word that this school officially closed down on July 5th, 2016. We’ll make updates here if we receive any news of the program returning.

For English speakers, Spanish is often on the top of the list of foreign languages to learn. There are 21 countries in the world where Spanish is the official language so it’s an incredibly useful language to know. Having basic knowledge of Spanish can get you pretty far when traveling in Central America, South America or Spain. It’s estimated that there are nearly 500 million Spanish speakers in the world, so it’s a ubiquitous language and 2nd to English, it’s perhaps the most useful language to know on a global level. Sure, there might be more people that speak Chinese or Hindi but these languages are restricted to just a couple countries in a small region, namely China and India.

Acquainting Ourselves With Castilian

We’ve been in Madrid for two weeks now and we haven’t been wasting anytime. Between finding an apartment, attempting to meet new people, and planning a few Spain trips and French getaways, we’ve been keeping ourselves occupied. Still, we’ve not forgotten our goal of improving our Spanish. From day one we’ve been mesmerized, somewhat perplexed, and often down right annoyed with the Spanish accent. It’s hard enough to learn a new language, but changing up the accent while we’re still learning has not enhanced our comprehension.

We’ve been taking classes at Frida Spanish School for a week and I can happily say we’re fluent now. Yes, we’re that smart.

Ok… Not really. But it has been going really well for both of us. We took a test the first day and were placed into classes according to our appropriate levels. Auston and I are in different classes but we both have excellent teachers. Our classmates are from all over the world (France, Germany, Brazil, Korea, Japan, etc). It definitely makes for an interesting four hours of class.

We’re also staying with a host family while at the school. We live with a wonderful woman named Araceli or Ara as we call her. She has been very helpful giving us advice on how to get around in the city and what to do around the area. She’s also very patient with us as we attempt to speak our butchered Spanish to her. She has a 3 bedroom home and we each have our own room.

Auston’s room

David’s room

Anyway, this is what a typical day looks like for us while we’re in Mexico City studying Spanish for 2 weeks.

Every morning we wake up and Ara has a delicious (and healthy) breakfast waiting for us on the table.

After we wash our dishes, we finish getting ready and head to class.

We catch a small bus a couple blocks away. It usually takes us about 40 min to get there. Traffic is terrible! Auston forgot to do his homework one day and quickly finished it on the bus. Reminds me of high school!

Then we have 4 hours of Spanish class.

In the evenings we’ll either do homework, hand wash some clothes and/or go out to eat if we don’t feel like cooking.

And of course we also spend some time sterilizing a few bottles of water for the day. Auston bought us an awesome sterilizer that uses UV light so we don’t have to buy bottled water every day.

One of the first things we’re going to do when we leave Arizona in May to travel is study Spanish. We’ve always wanted to learn it and have taken a few years of classes in high school and college. So we decided our first stop while backpacking is going to be Mexico City.

We’re going to be staying there for a month and have signed up to take Spanish classes at Frida Spanish School for the first two weeks as well as staying with a host family. If we like it, we’ll continue there for another week or two. Then we plan to travel around Central America for a couple weeks before starting the next leg of our journey.